Wanted: Nurses, doctors, medical-technologists

The Cebu provincial government is looking for a thousand more medical personnel to fill up the vacant positions in the province’s 16 provincial and district hospitals.

The Provincial Health Office has announced 1,000 vacancies for professionals who may wish to join the Capitol’s medical workforce.

According to PHO, only 1,500 positions of the 2,500 have been occupied, so far.

Doctor Rene Catan, PHO chief, said they need more medical workers— nurses, medical technologists, and medical specialists, particularly anesthesiologists—to cope up with demands of hospitals and to further improve their healthcare services.

In particular, he said, the bed capacities of the four provincial hospitals in Balamban town and in the cities of Bogo, Carcar and Danao have upgraded to 200 from 50 to 70.

He said the upgrade is also a way of the provincial government to compete with the private hospitals in the area, as well as to entice medical experts to join the Capitol workforce.

The development came after the Provincial Board approved Monday the Capitol’s P4.5 billion annual budget for next year.

Provincial health services will get the biggest chunk of the proposed 2018 budget at P1.4 billion. At least P630 million of the amount is intended to be used for the operations of four provincial and 12 district hospitals.

“PHO has a clear vision for Cebu hospitals,” Catan said.

He was referring to PHO’s plan to upgrade the provincial hospitals into medical centers.

Moreover, Catan said the office’s success indicator can be measured by the maternal death rate (MDR).

He said the province’s current MMR ratio is still at 20 over a hundred thousand.

He clarified though that the figure does not reflect yet the deaths among mothers during pregnancy, particularly those who died while in transport to the hospitals in Metro Cebu.

Those particular cases are included in Cebu City’s MDR which is 161 per 100,000 mothers.

The Philippines is one of the countries with the most number of mortality maternal death.

In 2015, there were roughly 114 mothers who died in childbirth per 100,000 live births in the country, way beyond the Millennium Development Goal target of 52 women per 100,000 live births.

A new target has been set under the Sustainable Development Goal, which has countries committing to reduce global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030.

To lessen maternal deaths, Catan said provincial and district hospitals need to be improved.

Pregnant women and other patients from the province’s far-flung areas need not have to travel several hours to Metro Cebu to seek medical attention, he said.